Deleting of Inactive users?

This about sums up my thoughts on this matter.

 

Yes, I had members that never logged in for about 6 months until I started doing site promotions.

Anyhow, please feel free to send your left overs my way...I'll add a music section if it helps

 

This and that.

 

I only delete unconfirmed members also. I don't really understand why anyone would purge old members, even inactive members can be valuable. You never know when they'll return, and in the meantime they could still be receiving your forum emails. Deleting an inactive member is deleting an opportunity.

 

Very well said. I agree.

 

I know a forum with these statistics: Threads: 254,150, Posts: 7,464,639, Members: 96,098.

The user ID for the most recent member is 136170. The most recent post ID is 9814072. I believe they prune everything every 3 months, getting rid of whatever has been inactive for 3 or more months. I would never do this.

 

Ick. That looks ugly, too.

 

What a waste of perfectly good posts. We should take over that forum and liberate it from pruning oppression!

 

:lol:

Some of us can only wish we had that much activity, while the others take it for granted and dispose of quality content/members. :frown:

 

No, why would I delete inactive users?v I have gone back to boards that I last posted 6 - 12 months ago.

I had my account deleted one time - because I had not visited in 3 - 4 months. I had in fact visited the forum, and on a regular basis, I had just not logged in. So because I did not log in my account was deleted.

 

See, this is what I try to avoid - which I do by never deleting a member, no matter what.

I'd be so angry if my account was deleted for being inactive for a period of time. I don't think I would ever go back after that.

 

It's happened.

I was once a member of an extremely low-traffic forum. During the second week of my registration, I went on vacation and was not able to log in. Once I got back, I found that the board was not accepting my login credentials. After contacting the staff, I was told that my account was physically removed due to my "unacceptable" level of inactivity.

It was a bit odd.

 

A couple of comments:
- If an account is pruned, the user can just re-register. So who cares if it was pruned after x months of inactivity?
- Regarding the site with the large statistics... if you have a large board, sometimes you make decisions regarding pruning members/posts because you want the board to run well without having to do certain upgrades to your hardware. I let our member count get up to 150,000 before I started to prune it. Our tracker hits the user table pretty heavily and our server was getting bogged down. Once I started pruning users, it sped up the whole board. Board statistics aren't a big deal to all site owners.

 

If I made say, a thousand posts on a forum and became inactive for a year (yes, it happens) then came back to find out that my account was deleted, I'd be devastated. I no longer have access to my original username or alias and have no control over my original profile and posts.

 

But I think most people in this thread who said they prune inactive accounts stated they only did so to users with 0 post count. So, in that case, who cares if the account was pruned?

 

Most did. But Savage referenced a forum that apparently deletes any- and everything that has been inactive for 3 months.

 

I don't usually delete users. Exception: Mathew Sibley got deleted because of an early forum feud.

 

Eventually you will get complaints and issues about usernames being taken, so I do do a lot of pruning for the larger forums. In addition, I also prune out known spammers according to SFS etc.

 

Yep, I had that brought up on my site a lot before I pruned users. I haven't had it brought up in ages since I started pruning accounts.

 

People should know by now that it's unreasonable to expect their favorite username will be available wherever they go.